Read Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade for Free Online Page B

cloneships were busy, and on the move.
    On Ptolemy-5, the enemy meatships still operated full bore, day and night. Without assistance, the planet would be stripped clean within a month.
    This was already a straight-up fight.
    They were simply joining the dance fashionably late.
    General Walker started off by dropping down five Divisions of Bravo Command Marines, including Company 36. One division each would take on and engage the five enemy battle groups of ten thousand Ejjai each.
    As Walker put it, delicately, they were going in to take those Ejjai clone bitches by the throat and knife open their guts through the spine. And once each enemy battle group was fully engaged, more Bravo Marines would be poised to drop in at the best points to wipe them out even faster.
    Naturally, reports of atrocities by the invaders were already routine and to be expected. The usual hi-tek war was waged trying to keep the invader broadcasts of those horrors to a minimum. The invaders went out of their way to be brutal, ruthless, and cruel. They rejoiced in such activity–even wallowed in it. And in keeping with their hyper-violent nature, they fought without quarter or mercy to butcher anything that lived.
    Bravo killed–hot or cold–quickly, and efficiently, only too happy to oblige the foe and surpass them in ferocity, if nothing else.
    The Marines went in at night, just the way they liked, did their homework, and got into position.
    They hammered the enemy hard, catching them in the middle, between the defenders. Yet the Ejjai were many, well-armed, and almost always fought to the death, laughing their eerie, chortling laughter.
    The war quickly fragmented like glass into scores of pocket battles, various unit campaigns of fronts, rears, and flanks. This pitted specific units against one another in a rather normal, conventional war.
    There were advantages and disadvantages to this. There was no way to separate the attackers away from the defenders, and the invaders were also attacking the civilian population and refugees at the same time. This made naval and Marine air and ground support far less useful and effective.
    This meant that most of the war had to consist of close-up fighting. Unit shield flared and disrupted against unit shield, with weapons barking and punching back and forth. Microbombs, negation grenades and various ordnance burst among both side.
    2 nd Platoon took on two hundred Ejjai at four to one odds. Undaunted, Leftenant Wilde led them into coordinated battle. They set their unit combat shields layered and full front, and charged them into the foe.
    The Anaconda sank her teeth deep into the invader throat, while her coils encircled and wrapped around them to throttle the life out of them.
    Not only that, but Marine reinforcements and support units dropped in out of nowhere to exploit enemy weaknesses wherever they appeared.
    Air and ground support couldn’t dust the entire area for fear of taking out friendlies. But they could use negations blasts to take down enemy shields over the invader positions, with little harm to friend or foe–except for exposing the slashers to direct fire without their shielding.
    Once their shields collapsed across the line, even the lander forces could exploit such advantages.
    2 nd Platoon marched in behind a drop of meks and gunned the Ejjai down point blank, filling the enemy’s armored faces and chests with blaster fire and glowing holes.
    Bravo broke them down. Then the local defenders demanded the right to take their vengeance upon all of the foes who remained. The Marines gave them that right, and went along only to back them up and help protect them from any enemy traps and nasty surprises.
    In almost every engagement, even when outnumbered, the elite Spacer Marines eventually outwitted, outfought, and overcame the Ejjai invaders and soundly defeated them, always with pitched fighting.
    Yet as always, new problems and complexities presented themselves. Every battle and combat